Systematic geophysical and geotechnical embankments survey in the area of the Humber Estuary and Yorkshire

Benes, V. and Normandale, D. and Cejka, F. and Boukalava, Z. and Simm, J.D. (2017) Systematic geophysical and geotechnical embankments survey in the area of the Humber Estuary and Yorkshire. In: ICFM7, 5-7 September 2017, Leeds, UK.

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Abstract

In the past 10 years, the eastern part of central England has repeatedly been affected by sudden floods caused by extreme climate events, such as tidal waves increased by storm surges, or heavy rainfall. In many areas, levees were damaged from overbank flow or breached as a consequence of overtopping or erosion taking place within the levee or in the underlying materials. It has therefore been necessary to repair or raise the levees in selected areas. In order to properly design and perform the renovation of the levee system, it is important to determine its existing condition, particularly the material composition, foundation conditions and occurrence of local inhomogeneities in the levees, such as old unknown drains, buried pipes and utilities, old riverbeds and material heterogeneity. The optimal approach for these purposes appears to be the combination of a geophysical and a follow-up geotechnical investigation. Since 2014, systematic geophysical surveying of the levee system in the Humber estuary and Yorkshire has been carried out. Up to the present time, approximately 146 km of levees have been surveyed. This report provides a description of the survey methods entitled GMS (Geophysical Monitoring System) that combines quick and effective methods for general levee description (e. g. the Slingram method) and methods providing detailed description of the characteristic as well as anomalous sections (e. g. electrical resistivity tomography – ERT, spontaneous polarization method – SP). By way of example, several results from the geophysical measurements and their comparison with the results of the follow-up geotechnical drilling investigation are presented as well. The investigation results have been imported into the GIS of the levee manager, which will facilitate their future utilisation. In this way, repeated geophysical measurements can be planned to detect changes taking place after the levees have been repaired or to examine the condition of selected problematic areas under flood loading. This approach has potential to make a significant contribution to ensuring the continued resilience of earthen flood levees and the communities they protect, across the globe.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information: 7th International Conference on Flood Management (ICFM7)
Uncontrolled Keywords: embankments and levees; defence integrity; geophysics; non-intrusive investigation; risk analysis
Subjects: Floods > Asset management
Divisions: Floods
Depositing User: Unnamed user with email i.services@hrwallingford.com
Date Deposited: 02 Apr 2020 09:53
Last Modified: 29 May 2020 07:41
URI: http://eprints.hrwallingford.com/id/eprint/1208

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